San Luis Valley Photography Tour/Workshop

Time will be spent on location in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado, photographing abandoned homesteads, towns, and thriving farming communities. These are enhanced by views of the Rio Grande and the impressive Sangre de Cristo mountain range of the southern Rocky Mountains. We will seek out bald and golden eagles, a wide variety of hawks, great-horned owls, coyotes, wild horses, and elk. In spring and fall, we will have the opportunity to photograph sandhill cranes and geese on their migratory flyway through the San Luis Valley.

In the winter peace, tranquility and solitude abound as silence settles over the land and nature turns the landscape into its personal artist palette. Wildlife and birds will surprise us in the blink of an eye. Hawks, eagles, and other raptors will be plentiful and playful, beckoning us onward from tree to tree and fence post to fence post, all the while flying low overhead and giving us a display of their colors and markings.

In springtime, these hawks will be nesting and raising their young. With great respect, we will observe them from a distance to afford them their place and well-being, leaving them undisturbed. The Eagles will be on the lookout for any opportunity for prey.

In the summer we will venture into the cool high country of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Here, rivers and streams fed by snowmelt, nourish wildlife and create abundance for bears, elk, a variety of birds, and wildflowers. In the valley, hawks and other raptors are now spending time enticing young fledglings to leave the nest with morsels of mice, rabbits, and numerous other rodents. Coyotes will be loping through fields in search of anything that moves. Afternoon thunderstorms leave the air pristine with a great chance of wide, arcing rainbows and stunning sunsets.

In fall the golden aspen groves and cottonwoods form a backdrop to the landscape of rivers and streams surrounded by snow-capped peaks. Cowboys rounding up cattle in vast meadows head to the valleys for winter.